Class determinants of Turkish foreign policy under the rule of the Justice and Development Party

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2016

Öğrenci: ÇAĞLAR OYMAN

Danışman: FARUK YALVAÇ

Özet:

This study aims to provide a historical and class based reading of the Turkish Foreign Policy and its periodically changing dynamics under the rule of the Justice and Development Party since 2002. It basically argues that there is an 'integral' relationship between societal (class) structures and state policies. Accordingly, it defends that state policies are determined by the competing accumulation strategies and hegemonic projects of the different class fractions from a relational perspective. On the other hand, this study additionally argues that emphasized societal structures are not pre-given in their natures. Rather, they are circumscribed by their 'mutually' determining relations with the 'modern' international system. In this sense, it is argued that there is an organic relationship between unit and system levels of social formations unlike the basic assumptions of neorealism as the mainstream understanding of the International Relations. This study -in order to explain the essence of aforementioned organic relationship- claims that 'overall social totality' corresponds to 'dialectical' togetherness of sub-domestic structural mechanisms -which are the class relations from Marxist point of view- and its generated spatial levels or moments as respectively corresponding to nation states and international systems. Based on this framework, this study intends to demonstrate that the structural shape of contemporary Turkey's class relations -and accordingly trajectories of its internal and external policy choices- is the historical outcome of those multi-dimensional and complex sets of interactions.